Throughout his 29-year tenure as host, the 11-time Daytime Emmy winner paved the way for Oprah Winfrey and others.
The discourse was transformed and daytime television history was altered by the talk show pioneer Phil Donahue, whose weekday program he led for almost thirty years. He was eighty-eight.
After a protracted illness, Donahue passed away Sunday night at his New York City home, according to his family.
Among the survivors is Marlo Thomas, star of That Girl, his wife of 44 years. Before being married in May 1980, they first met while she was a guest on his show. At the time, he was a divorced single parent who was raising his four boys.
The Phil Donahue Show has almost 6,000 incarnations presented by the Cleveland native, starting with the first broadcast on November 7, 1967, from a Dayton, Ohio station, and ending with the final one that was viewed nationally through syndication via Multimedia Entertainment, on Sept. 13, 1996.
Donahue carried his microphone into the crowd as he discussed hot-button issues of the day and encouraged his studio audience to join in. He got good at weaving his own running commentary between their queries and comments.
His show became well-known and well-liked due to its innovative issue-oriented approach and cutting-edge issues such as penile implants, alcoholism, incest, abortion, same-sex couples parenting children, and priests’ pedophilia.
A writer for Newsweek once stated, “One sometimes suspects that Donahue’s idea of the perfect guest is an interracial lesbian couple who had a child by artificial insemination.”
Following his program’s explosive success in Dayton, Donahue relocated it to Chicago in 1974, and subsequently to New York. He was the most popular interviewer on daytime television for a considerable amount of time in the 1970s and 1980s, drawing around 9 million viewers—mostly women—to each program.
In a 2001 interview with the TV Academy Foundation website The Interviews, Donahue stated, “We grew up with the feminist movement, the consumer movement, the gay rights movement, we grew up with the antiwar movement, and the environmental movement.” The latter half of the 20th century, when I was allowed to appear in public on television and interview the most knowledgeable experts about these fascinating topics, had my
Up until Oprah Winfrey debuted her own talk show in 1985, Donahue had the world to himself. “The extent of her influence on the daytime television industry cannot be overstated,” he remarked. “It was astounding.” (In 1987, she would overthrow him in the ratings.)
Donahue announced his retirement in 1996 after turning sixty and winning eleven Daytime Emmys. Winfrey then gave him a Lifetime Achievement award. She remarked, “I would like to express my gratitude for opening the door so widely—wide enough for me to walk through.” “I don’t think Oprah could have happened if Phil Donahue hadn’t existed.”
He was one of the recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in May.
The youngest of two children, Phillip John Donahue was born in Cleveland on December 21, 1935. His mother had been a department store elevator operator before becoming a stay-at-home mom, while his father worked as a furniture salesman.
Donahue went to Notre Dame and St. Edward High, two exclusive institutions for guys. Prior to graduating from college in 1957 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration, he worked as an early-morning farm reporter for WNDU-TV, the campus NBC station in South Bend.
Donahue claimed that the newspaper chain Scripps-Howard’s motto, “Give Light, and the People Will Find Their Own Way,” had a profound impact on him throughout his formative years. The Cleveland Press’s downtown headquarters had those words displayed along its exterior for a whole city block.
In his TV Academy interview, he asked, “Was that my first stirrings of free speech and the First Amendment?” “At the time, I believed I knew every answer. I understood as I grew older that I had a hundred thousand questions, but it was more fascinating to ask the questions than to believe I had the answers. For me, it was a true epiphany.
After landing a position at KYW-TV in Cleveland as a summer stand-in broadcaster, Donahue was let go when the regulars returned from their vacation. After following his college love to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he worked as a bank teller, he was unable to find employment in journalism. (In February 1958, he tied the knot with Margaret Cooney, with whom he would have five children in six years.)
